The Darkness In Me
by Sihaya
Summary: Ginny never got over Harry. Draco never got over his Dark ways. When Harry discovers his true feelings, he becomes the third person in a disastrous love triangle. *Non-Slash*
1. One

~*The Darkness in Me*~ 

**~*~**

**~*Summary- **Ginny never got over Harry. Draco never got over his Dark ways. When Harry discovers his true feelings, he becomes the third person in a disastrous love triangle. *Non-Slash*

**~*Pairing- **H/G, D/G

**~*Disclaimer-** I do not own Harry Potter, unfortunately I do not own Draco Malfoy, and worst of all, I do not own Oliver Wood. Oh yeah, and I don't own anyone else either. The plot is all I have. *weeps* __

**~*~**

               It was late at night when Ginny finally returned to the Burrow. Her hair whipped around her face in a midnight wind as she soared in on her broomstick towards the house. The windows were dark- everyone was asleep. Not that everyone was a lot of people these days. Percy had a nice apartment in London, since it was so much easier to commute to work at the Ministry of Magic from there. Fred and George were long since gone, the joke shop had profited so greatly that the humble shop in Diagon Alley had spread into a chain, one in Paris, one in Cairo, one in St. Petersburg… the twins didn't need the Burrow anymore. Bill and Charlie were away on business, as they had been for the majority of Ginny's life. The only people left were her mother, her father, Ron, and the illustrious Harry Potter.

               Ginny still had mixed feelings about Harry staying at the Burrow. Mr. and Mrs. Weasley had invited him to stay with them while he got his feet back on the ground, and he had spent so many of the last years with them that it seemed pointless to leave him out in the cold now. _Not that he'd be in the cold anyway, _said a snide little voice in the back of Ginny's head. _Not with those piles and piles of Galleons that he's got stored away below Gringotts. He doesn't **need **us, so why is everyone acting like he does? He'd be fine on his own._

But the other half of Ginny wished that Harry would stay. He was a brother in some ways, maybe even most ways, but he was so much more than that. Things had been strange between them since- well, since forever. Ginny would never forget the day she first laid eyes on Harry Potter in person. Even though she was a small girl, a child, nowhere near being of age, she knew that there was something special about Harry that had absolutely nothing to do with Lord Voldemort. The way his eyes moved down her body, the way his mouth moved when he talked, the way his hair fell across his face, there was something there that made Ginny's heart skip two beats.

               She slid the key in the lock of the door and twisted the knob. Metal grated against metal, and the door creaked as she pushed it open as quietly as she could. The jamb was in need of a good oiling, just like everything else in the house. Ginny firmly shut the door and relocked it as she slid off her jacket and hung it on a peg next to the door. Silently, she walked into the kitchen in her socked feet, not wanting to make any noise lest the remaining people in the Burrow be disturbed from their sleep. She heard a rustle, a strange noise in the kitchen. Slowly she drew her wand out of the back pocket of her Muggle jeans. 

               "Ginny." It was a statement, not a question. She could see the outline of a shaggy-haired head in the moonlight.

               "Harry?" she asked, coming a few steps forward. The threatening tip of her wand lowered as she realized that it was indeed Harry, standing at the kitchen window in the dead of night. "What are you doing here? It's late."

               "I'm thinking," he said softly. His voice was colder than she remembered. She didn't dare to ask what he might be thinking about. Harry scared her sometimes, the way he brooded around the house, not wanting to go out, not wanting to fly, not wanting to go to his training for the Auror tests…

               "I don't know you anymore, Harry," Ginny said, her voice almost cracking. She mustered all the self-control that she had and refused to let herself cry. She wouldn't let herself appear weak to Harry Potter. She took a deep breath and steadied her voice. "What's going on with you, Harry? It's like you're losing your grip on everything at the same time." She came a step closer.

               "It's nothing," he said, turning away from the window. Ginny could sense that he was avoiding her gaze. Harry stepped past her and started climbing the rickety staircase two steps at a time. She watched his retreating back melt into the darkness.

               Ginny wasn't tired anymore. She sat down at the kitchen table and pulled a magazine towards her. Harry's face gazed up at her from under his lashes. _Everyone's treating him like such a sex symbol now, _Ginny thought, annoyed that somewhere out there, little teenage girls might be clipping his pictures out from magazines and pining over them, and they didn't even know. They didn't know who Harry was, or what he had become. Disgusted, Ginny tossed the magazine back onto the table. It slid across the tabletop and flipped over the other side, landing with a slap and a rustle on the floor. _Just because he finished off Lord Voldemort, finally…everyone's taking notice of him again. He's the great hero that saved the world and is now looking for love. How sweet, how lovely…_

_               How utterly nauseating. _Ginny slammed her palms down on the kitchen table and stood up. _I wish that I had never laid eyes on Harry Potter, _she thought. _He's made everything so much more difficult than it should be for a 19-year-old waitress. It's not fair…but then, when has it ever been fair? Never. I'm going to bed. _

She climbed the stairs, gripping the railing so hard that her knuckles turned white. _I'm finished with Harry Potter, once and for all! _A defiant voice in her mind cried out. Ginny was sick of lying to herself, like she had been lying to herself ever since Harry had first come to the Burrow. Harry had never liked her, he never would, he would only think of her as the unwelcome little sister that he might as well have had. _I'm a sister to him, if I am anything at all, _Ginny thought as she threw the covers over her still-clothed body. _I will never be his lover. ___

               **_Ever. _**


	2. Two

Chapter Two*~ 

            The next morning, Harry seemed as normal as he had ever been. He took of with Ron on the two Firebolt 55 brooms that Fred and George had given them to go to Auror practice, as usual. Ginny woke to the sunshine and their silhouettes gliding across the sky. Their robes whipped out behind them as they disappeared from sight below the horizon.

               Since she had woken up later than usual, Ginny rushed to get dressed and hopped on her broom, heading in the same direction that Harry and Ron had gone. She bussed tables in a small, modest Wizarding café on the outskirts of London by day, and on Fridays like this day, she worked in a Muggle nightclub when she had finished her shift. Sometimes she enjoyed the nights in the club more than she did spending the day with her own kind of people- Muggles were so much more interesting in some ways. It was fun to observe how oblivious they were to the world around them. Ginny enjoyed flirting with them, too, and it would be a useful experience if she decided to pursue a career based on Muggle Studies, which had always been her best subject. The bag that she had packed her skimpier outfit in banged slightly against her broom as she began to dive down to where the café was located.

               "Hey, Gin," called a lilting Irish voice from the window of the back room. Tommy O'Malley waved at a hand at her from the sink in the kitchen and then continued washing the dishes that he was occupied with. Ginny leaned her broom against the stand that the employees used and went inside to where Tommy was. She unhooked her apron from the peg and threw it over her head as she greeted her friend.

               "Hi Tommy," she said. "How've you been?"

               "Good as ever," he replied, grinning at her and sliding a clean dish onto the drying rack. "What about you? Taking care of yourself?"

               "To the best of my abilities, yes," Ginny said as she slid a pad, a pencil, and some straws into her pocket and pushed open the swinging doors. "Have fun," she said sarcastically, eyeing the pile of dishes yet to be washed.

               "Always too," he said brightly as she took note of who was sitting at her tables. There was a lone businessman reading a _Daily Prophet_ at table 3, a woman in a miniskirt and bright red robes at table 7, and a young couple sitting with their feet nudging each other's at table 9. As the woman in the scandalous robes was closest, Ginny walked over to her table first.

               "What would you like to order?" she asked the woman, momentarily distracted by the long, pointed, lime-green fingernails that the woman was tapping exasperatedly on the table.

               "An alcoholic butterbeer and a Belgian waffle, please," the woman said quietly. 

               "We don't serve alcohol this early in the morning, ma'am," Ginny answered as she scrawled the order onto the pad in sloppy script. 

               "_Virgin _butterbeer, then," the woman answered, slightly raising her voice. The door opened and the small bell rang out across the store as Mary came scurrying out of the bathroom to begin waiting on her own tables.

               "May I take your order, sir?" Ginny heard Mary ask as she rang the cook's bell and called out, "Belgian waffle and a butterbeer, Mark!" 

               "Toast and butter, and a glass of water," a slick voice asked. Ginny froze where she stood, her hand still suspended above the bell. _Malfoy! What the heck is he doing here? _Thankfully he hadn't noticed her yet and she ducked into the bathroom. The mirror reflected a flushed redhead whose blush didn't happen to complement her hair very nicely. Ginny calmed herself down and fixed her hair as she tried to keep track of all the different thoughts blasting through her head, from _That evil snake _to _He was pretty cute when I saw him at Hogwarts. _She ran a mascara brush along her eyelashes and then straightened up, slipping the mascara into the pocket where she always kept it. _Calm down, Virginia, it's just Draco. Its…just…Draco._

_               Draco?!_

_               You have to get out of this bathroom if you want to get paid. _Resolutely, Ginny stormed out of the bathroom grasping her pad and her pencil in one hand and strode over to the table where the couple sat. Their hands lay clasped together on the table and they were speaking softly. Ginny cleared her throat. "May I take your order?" 

               "We'll both have pancakes," the boy said, glancing up at Ginny for a moment and then returning his gaze to his girlfriend's face. 

               "Ok, and to drink?"

               "Café Latte," said the girl, "and we only need one glass."

               "Ook," Ginny answered, writing the order down. She was acutely aware that she would have to walk past Malfoy as she went to take her other customer's order. His face was still obscured by the front page of the _Daily Prophet. _Malfoy, on the other hand, was glancing around the restaurant. Ginny had a perfect view of his shoulders. _He's going to see the back of me. Maybe he won't recognize me._

_               I hope my butt looks good today. _

Ginny took a deep breath and walked across the relatively small room, her eyes fixed on Malfoy's hair. He was reading the ingredients on the ketchup bottle as she passed and for a moment she allowed herself to feel relieved. He hadn't seen her! _Phew- _

"Weasley!" 

               _Darn it. Darn it. Darn it! _

Ginny stopped dead in her tracks and turned on her heel. "Malfoy," she said.

               "What are you doing here?" Draco asked, squinting up at her face as if to make sure that it was really Ginny.

               "I think the better question is, what are _you _doing here, Malfoy? Did they run out of your favorite coffee back in Knockturn Alley?"

               "I'm in London on business."

               "What business?" Ginny snorted. "I wasn't aware the Malfoys even _have _a business anymore. Voldemort's dead, you know," she informed him. Malfoy glared at her, his head tilted, the sunlight glaring off his white-blonde head. 

               "Sit down, Weasley," he ordered.

               "I can't, I'm working, and I'm not going to get paid if I don't work," said Ginny, eyeing the man who was still waiting to be served. She could see his balding plate from over the headline. 

               "Sit," he repeated. Ginny plopped her butt down onto the leather booth seat and crossed her arms, her pad still in her hand. "So you work in a café?" he said, raising one eyebrow. "Even that Potter boy could do better."

               Ginny stood. "You know, Malfoy, I really do have to get back to work," she said, throwing him a fake smile. "I'm sure I'll have the misfortune of running into you again during your stay."

               "Cheers to that," said Malfoy as Ginny turned around and strode over to where the man was sitting.

               "Sir, can I take your order?" she asked tonelessly. 

               "Just coffee, please," he said, his eyes still glued to the paper. Malfoy caught Ginny's eye and winked as she walked over to where the kitchen bell stood and called in her orders. The first one, the one for the strange woman with the robes, was already done and it was sitting growing cold on the countertop. Ginny scooped it up and balanced it on her palm as she carried it over.

               "It's about time," the lady said, in a voice just over a whisper. Ginny chose not to answer as she walked off, afraid that something unpleasant might come out. Her mood had taken a definite downturn after talking to Malfoy. 


End file.
